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Ostara's the time when many would say: Loose the chocolate.

But me, I say: Lose the chocolate.

For religious reasons, lose it.

***

I live in Minnesota. It is wrong—wrong—that, in the stores here, apples should be expensive, and bananas cheap.

Wrong.

 ***

Chocolate, like copal and bananas, is an exotic visitor from the fabled Southern lands of Ever-Summer. There's the connection with Ostara: think of it as sympathetic magic.

In a few years, most of the world's cacao trees, grown unsustainably in inappropriate places where—as a cash crop—their cultivation has helped to destroy sustainable local agriculture, will be dead from cacao blight, anyway.

By then, of course, oil will be running out in good earnest, and it will no longer be economically feasible to move foodstuffs over large distances.

Then chocolate will once again become the expensive exotic that, by rights, it ought to be.

Ninety percent of American homes are air-conditioned.

Ninety percent.

Talk about carbon footprint.

That's why, for pagans, air-conditioning is a religious issue.

That's why—at least for now—I plan to remain one of the ten percent.

I live in a big old brick house in Minnesota, where it's too cold during the winter and too hot during the summer. Usually we're pretty comfortable until the bricks heat up around Old Midsummer's/Fourth of July. Then it can get pretty hot.

Fortunately, my friend Craig comes from Dallas, and is just old enough to remember life BA (Before Air). Here's what he recommends.

In other years I’ve been sunburned at Beltain. I’ve been overwhelmed by the heat and had to hide in the shade of the trees. I’ve had to worry about not de-hydrating during rituals. It’s a festival whose traditions include young couples going off into the woods at night.

I’m writing this blog post while wearing a winter jumper, the windows are shut because it’s too cold to have them open. Right now, there is sun outside, but most of the day has been cold and wet. May the first was cold and wet, at the end of a cold, late spring and a winter that seemed to go on forever. It’s years like this when you can start to see why our ancestors might have felt the need to do dramatic things to persuade the sun to come back.

Last night I read the news about Cape Town, and then dreamed that my garden died.

I live in a condo in Los Angeles, so my garden is small and fragile and mostly in containers: calendula and tulsi and borage and lemon balm in pots and window boxes, selfheal that's dying no matter what I do, jasmine and passionvine that twine around each other in bombastic friendship, nasturtiums that cascade in a curtain of friendly little circles. Baby blue eyes and violet seedlings growing in a flat. Cleveland sage in a pot, since the soil is mostly clay, and sagebrush and California fuschia in the ground, since they can tolerate that clay. I had to fight with my building manager to put plants in the bare dirt behind the building, even though I'm on the HOA board; status quo bias is so strong that people trust ugly cracked ground more than they trust small, quiet plants. (I won the rest of the board over partly by telling them my unit's property values are suffering because of the eyesore that is the dirt. In reality I don't care much about the property values, but a witch uses the tools in her toolbox; she shapeshifts when she needs to.)

Hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, floods.

I'm not really saying that Republicans are responsible.

Not really.

We would say: climate change.

Traditional societies would say: the wights are angry.

(Wights: literally, “beings”: also, elves, fairies, huldrefolk, land-"spirits", etc.)

Two ways, perhaps, of describing the same thing.

Why are the wights angry?

Eclipses are said to be a closing of one door and an opening of a window. At this past full moon on 6th September I did some Tarot queries using Joanna Colbert Powell's Gaian Tarot. The results were a bit counter-intuitive. A full moon is a culmination, but all the cards were pointing to beginnings and letting go so the new could happen. So eclipse season ain't over yet. Nope! The weather happening globally is the narrative set by the eclipse.

Fire and water are duking it out all over the USA. Here in Ireland, after a relatively dry (for us) winter, spring and summer, Lunasadh has brought the monsoon season upon us. In our boggy, heavy clay laden west of Ireland the water tends to pool. There is only so much land can hold and then it just lies on top. In winter we have these naturally occurring lakes called turloughs that evaporate in summer. Well, the turloughs are arriving early! And our car engine was killed when some local flooding on our lane turned out to be deeper than estimated.

Researchers take a look at bat communication. Zoologists map the lives of animals. And environmentalists grow concerned that the new U.S. administration will leave global warming unchecked. It's Earthy Thursday, our segment about science and Earth-related news. All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!